Inside South Africa's fast bowling hamdemic

All of us who have legs also have hamstrings. Three at the back of each upper thigh, in fact. They help us bend at the knees, move our thighs and hips backward, and slow down our stride so our feet hit the ground under control.

Without hamstrings we cannot walk or run. And we know all about it when they hurt. But not all of us put our hamstrings to hard work in the cause of bowling as fast as we can. Those who do run on a tightrope.

Five of South Africa’s best fast bowlers — Kagiso Rabada, Lungi Ngidi, Kwena Maphaka, Ottneil Baartman and Lutho Sipamla — have fallen off the tightrope in the past few weeks. All of them except Sipamla were in South Africa’s squad for the ODI series against Australia that started at Kingsmead on Thursday.

All five have been caught by the safety net of treatment and rehabilitation, and will doubtless be back on the tightrope. But while one or two is unfortunate, five similarly injured fast bowlers is a hamdemic and prompts questions. What are CSA getting wrong?

“In an ideal world only one thing can cause this,” Ramjee said. “But it’s not one thing. KG suffered his injury while he was busy with his preseason conditioning. Lungi and Ottneil broke down during the first round of [domestic first-class matches]. Kwena has been working hard over the winter in the high-performance set-up.”

“The bottom line is there’s probably no single cause that we can look at. There are many we can talk about that have the potential. But there is good cause to think that when there’s transition it can create a vulnerable point.”

“We know that the prevalence of hamstring and lower back injuries are the highest in the fast bowling cohort. We try and ensure, in our planning and implementation, that we reduce the risk of that happening and try to build resistance towards mitigating that risk in the future. Sometimes things go to plan and sometimes, unfortunately, they don’t.”

We also can’t disregard the immense strain bowling fast for a living puts on the body. If you didn’t know a googly from a thigh pad and you saw someone charge in and bowl, you would be forgiven for thinking there were points on offer for the entirely awkward, least efficient, utterly self-harming way to propel a ball forward. Some people see poetry in motion when a fast bowler approaches the crease. Others see injuries waiting to happen.

Ramjee isn’t in the latter camp. But, as a scientist, he can see the facts: “Fast bowlers are unique machines. You’ve got this lengthy run-up, this massive stride going into the bowling action. Then the front foot comes down and forces go in the opposite direction — from the ground through the foot, the ankle, the leg bones, the muscles, the spine.

“And then the bowler rotates and releases. Then there’s the follow-through and all the braking that needs to take place to slow down all that force. You’ve got a massive load going through the body.”

Makes you wonder, doesn’t it, why fast bowling doesn’t come with a health warning: don’t try this at home or anywhere else. Like cigarette packs that feature dramatic photographs of blackened lungs to dissuade people from smoking, footage of bowlers clutching their hamstrings or other parts could be reeled out to make innocents think twice.

That is never going to happen, of course. At least modern cricketers wear GPS monitors that give people like Manjra so much data and detail about them that they know more about the players than the players themselves.

“We look at individual metrics to find acute chronic workloads. If we start seeing levels going into danger zones we know we need to intervene. If the levels are too low we need to step things up. If they’re too high we need to step them back.”

How does all that high falutin doctor talk wash with old-school cricket people like Shukri Conrad and Piet Botha? “Thankfully they are so supportive because they understand why this is important,” Ramjee said.

Similarly no-one is going to be able to put the cork back into the bottle that has unleashed a champagne supernova of cricket into the world.

“We’re no longer looking at a cricket season as series to series or even season to season. We’re looking at it as a calendar year. We’re calculating the number of balls a fast bowler could bowl in a year, and how to protect them based on that — look for the early warning signs that give us a sense that we need to take action, or do we need to be proactive and say these guys will play the series and then they won’t play. Like the Australians do.”

The Aussies have treated their fast bowlers like valuable relics for years. Their current squad is a case in point. Pat Cummins, 33, the appointed Test and ODI captain, is likely to miss two of the three ODIs his team will play in South Africa in a bid to keep him at optimum freshness for the Tests that start on October 9. Cummins and Mitchell Starc, 36, weren’t involved in the three ODIs Australia played in Zimbabwe on their way to South Africa. Josh Hazlewood, 35, featured in only one of those games.

Ramjee agreed there was a lesson there: “Can we learn from Australia? Yes we can. The medical and science teams know this stuff. They understand it and they will use it. But we need the buy-in from everybody around us, the players included.”

Click here to read article